Border War: Initial Thoughts
As the first Border War in 14 years comes to a close, I have some thoughts.
So much happened in that 42-31 Missouri win, it’ll be hard to get all of my thoughts into order. But I’ll give it a shot.
1. Outside of the fumble, I was very impressed by Beau Pribula once again.
The fumble was bad. No sugarcoating it.
But after that, Beau Pribula was making smart decisions. He made a couple of perfectly-placed throws, made the right reads on plays the Tigers needed and kept the team in the fight.
He wasn’t perfect, but for his first start against a Power-4 opponent, I would say that went pretty well.
2. Missouri looked like the better team for pretty much the whole game.
Obviously, it didn’t end as a blowout.
But outside of a few key mistakes, the Tigers looked like the much better team.
The Pribula fumble, the deep pass that got over Daylan Carnell and the facemask (that maybe wasn’t?) against Darris Smith all kept the game close.
But that makes up three plays in a game of almost 150. And on most of the other plays, the Tigers looked like the better team.
Rivalries end up being close most of the time. But if you judged play-by-play, I think you would agree the Tigers were the better team almost throughout today.
3. The fight is still there.
I just talked about how Pribula was able to keep the team in the fight. But there was some slight worry without Brady Cook around anymore that the Tiger “Never say die” mentality of the past couple of years might have left with him.
Judging by today, it has not.
The Tigers could have fallen into a hole after getting into a 21-6 deficit very quickly. Nothing was going right.
But Missouri kept fighting and got back into it pretty quickly.
That’s going to be necessary at times through the season. You can’t say today was a slow start when both sides of the ball looked dominant on their first respective drives, but after that it got bad in a hurry.
But the team just kept fighting.
4. The Tigers didn’t make every play on offense. But they made the ones they had to.
There were a lot of offensive drives that didn’t look great. But when the Tigers absolutely needed to score, they did.
The Kevin Coleman touchdown to stay in the fight, the Donovan Olugbode fourth-down catch. The Coleman 50-yard catch to help tie the game before halftime. Then Coleman again on fourth-and-7 in the fourth before a fourth-down touchdown to Brett Norfleet.
Missouri went 4-of-5 on fourth downs alone.
And they even got the three-and-out on defense late in the fourth to end Kansas‘ hopes.
When the Tigers desperately needed a play, they executed.
And even when they didn’t, Jamal Roberts broke free for a 63-yard touchdown just for fun.
